Cantami, o musa
by Flacchus
Summary: John Watson could colour the white walls of his room with mottled arabesques. Sherlock Holmes could make him tremble in fear and lose himself. They could have saved each other, in another life. AU.


When the wind finally stopped blowing, the only noise in the air was that of a liquid dripping, drop by drop, on the floor. It was a calming noise: its regularity seemed to make the world a little quieter and a bit less chaotic, which was exactly what his mind needed at the moment.  
The wind had been distracting him, breaking the calmness of the atmosphere and thus ruining the soothing symphony that his mind—always busy caring about all the small details that built the multi-coloured image of the world in front of his eyes—so desperately ached for in order to rest.

Besides, he really needed some concentration in this peculiar instance; he knew it was only a matter of minutes before the arrival of his brother, who, in what anyone but him would have called a glimpse of genius, would have finally thought of looking for him in his little wooden house in the garden. There, he was safe, but it was absolutely vital for him to get out of there before his family found out what was really happening inside of it.

This small enclave in which the young boy liked to find a refuge when his mind seemed about to implode had been built, hidden among the oaks, by his father as a birthday present; he could not count, not even if asked, the innumerable hours he'd spent there, concealing himself from the world in general and from his family in particular—hours spent trying not to think and not to obsess, since his prodigious mind had the habit of getting so hooked on certain things to turn what a sane person would define as a liking into some sort of sinful attachment.

Lately his hiding place had also become the only location in the whole Earth where he could feel safe and free from all the moral and social conventions that he was obliged to follow when in company of other human beings. He would just sit there, in the dark, being himself.  
His little wooden house with its small windows and its now blood-stained floor had become his secret laboratory.

He was now in the process of finishing his latest creation, the final evolution of a course of thought that had been wandering and constantly changing in his mind for months, like a swirl of paint in the water—spiralling and turning into a new idea, a new scenario, a new form of genius.  
He knew he was really close to the end, to cutting the final cut; his constant and invariable research of beauty in ugly things had led him there, to the last stage of his new, cruel obsession.

The grip on the knife in his right hand was steady.  
The cuts all looked like works of art—an abominable, unmentionable form of art that could have only been originated from a mind so brilliant, so gifted and so complicated to become an aberration, a monster totally devoid of moral.

_One last cut._

He was looking for perfection, and he would have achieved it.  
He placed the tip of the knife onto the bloody chunk of flesh he was working on and he plunged it almost completely inside it.

Then, a sudden noise—that of the door behind him being opened in a rush by his brother—made him lose all his concentration and the steadiness of his grip, and he stared in disappointment and the askew cut that had ruined his work, making it look _wrong_ and imperfect. He looked at it blankly, trying not to cry, or to scream. The precarious order he had managed to create for himself vanished, like smoke on the breeze; he felt empty.

"Sherlock!" Mycroft shouted, but the younger boy didn't fully turn to face him. He only moved his neck a little bit to leer at him. He could not stand how much his brother _cared_ for him, how ready he was to justify every single one of his actions only because he thought Sherlock's mind was crippled: it was humiliating, in the least.  
His brother was looking at him in relief; he truly had been worried about him. His ginger hair was windswept and messy, and there was mud on his trousers. He was panting, bending over to peek at him; the size of the door, just as everything else there, was half of the size of a standard entrance .  
"We've been looking for you everywhere! Why didn't you tell us you were going to stay here? You've been away for almost a whole day," he continued. He took a deep breath. "Why is it so dark in here? Let's turn on the lights, shall we?"

Sherlock's heart missed a beat when he saw his brother's hand next to the switch he had so carefully avoided in the eventuality of being actually found during the realisation of his project; luckily, Mycroft hadn't noticed the smell yet, but it was essential that he didn't see what Sherlock had been up to. The boy needed a diversion.

"Wait, have you found Torricelli yet?" Sherlock asked. The dog had been missing for almost a week.

"No, not yet," Mycroft replied. "Are you worried, brother?"

Sherlock felt the rage inside his chest boiling again. He loathed how Mycroft would always ask him such questions, trying to see if he was going to have a normal reaction, if he was actually able of feeling.

"Of course I am," the younger replied, and he could almost hear Mycroft's unexpressed sigh of relief. After a small pause, he added: "He's our dog. I'm supposed to be worried, aren't I?"

Mycroft bit his upper lip. "Yes, that's certainly a way to put it."  
He wasn't panting anymore, and Sherlock was still turning his back to him.

"Well, what have you been up to?" Mycroft asked. The boy didn't reply, and he frowned. "Why won't you answer? Sherlock, are you okay?"

"Go away," Sherlock murmured. "You'll ruin everything."

"What do you mean?" The other asked in disbelief. And then, obviously, he inquired: "What's this smell? Let me turn on the lights!"

Sherlock knew he had crossed the line. There was no coming back at this point.  
Mycroft would have found out everything, and then his family would have locked him up in a cellar, trying to forget he had ever existed. His brilliant mind would have rotten—nothing was going to keep it busy anymore, and it would have collapsed like a castle of cards…

"Go away," he repeated, almost begging, finally turning himself to face his brother.

Mycroft ignored him, and pressed the switch. His eyes widened.

The scene in front of him was too much to bear for everyone.

Sherlock's childish visage was covered in blood, and there was blood on his hands, too, and on the knife he was holding, and on his clothes, and on his lap, and on the floor and the walls, and as well on what was sitting in front of Sherlock—something that looked like a chunk of flesh covered in diagonal cuts. When he laid his eyes on what was laying in the corner of the small room, Mycroft screamed.

"What have you done?!" He cried, looking at his younger brother in horror and disbelief. "_What have you done?!_"

"I can explain!" Sherlock began, quite pathetically, raising one of his blood-stained hands.

"I never believed you would have reached this point," Mycroft continued, looking at him, disgusted and mortified at the same time. "I never, never, _never_…"

But Sherlock wasn't listening to him anymore. He knew exactly what was going to happen to him now, and everyone could have read it in his azure eyes.

Mycroft lips were now trembling. He stepped back and ran away, straight towards their house, calling his parents in a loud, frightened voice. Soon, his clothes stained of green for he had fallen on the lawn, he reached the front door. Sherlock could hear the sound of it being opened and then closed abruptly.

He looked blankly at his ruined work, at the carcass placidly lying in front of him.  
He didn't move. He felt as he had lost consciousness of himself and had become the noise made by the blood drops as they ripping on the floor. He wish he hadn't existed in the first place.

When his father's strong arms dragged him out of his shelter, he didn't protest.  
He vaguely remembered shouting—lots of it—and people calling his name. He remembered being hit in the face, but without feeling anything.

Torricelli's head, deprived of its eyes and teeth, was looking at him from the corner of the room; his mother was crying; his father was seizing him by his neck, and there was so much noise, so much confusion, and then—_and then…_

_No no no no don't touch it you'll ruin everything I only wanted it to stay beautiful forever don't you see stop screaming I cannot bear it anymore no no no don't dig there please put those away you weren't meant to see them please no I did it yes father I did it mum stop crying oh lord Mycroft look at the mess you've made I was bored I was bored I needed something to do I needed to stop thinking I won't do it again I'm not lying but please don't bring me there I don't want to go I don't want to go I could be so perfect so clever but please don't lock me away—_

"Sherlock!" Mycroft exclaimed, bringing him back to reality. "Would you mind paying attention to me for a few seconds?"

Sherlock Holmes, now years and years older than the young boy who had been caught on the scene of a crime he hadn't understood, opened his eyes. He had grown and his face was now sharper, longer, but he still looked like the scared little kid with curly hair and bloodied hands he had been many years before. With his hands joined under his chin, he looked as if he was praying.

"I was thinking," he answered coldly. "I cannot really say there is anything else left to do here, can I?" He added, pointing his right index finger to his surroundings.

Sherlock was sitting on a dull bed with white sheets, and they were as white as basically everything in his room—from the walls to the chair in front of the desk placed next to the window, from the clothes he was wearing to the bookshelves near his bed; the only colourful things were the covers of his books, arranged in alphabetical order. The nurses had recently taken his violin away from him when he had tried to cut away his fingers with its strings.

"May I suggest you an activity you could occupy yourself with as long as I'm here?" said Mycroft, raising one of his eyebrows. He was sitting on another chair, next to his brother's bed.

"I'd be delighted," his brother replied.

"You could listen to me!" Mycroft exclaimed, and Sherlock sighed. "Sherlock, I'm seriously worried about you. You've been intractable lately. Not to mention the fact that you've already tried to amputate your own body parts several times this year—"

"As you might have noticed, it happens with a quite regular cadence. Why does it still surprise you?" his brother asked.

"Because I've been trying to help you even more lately! I've brought you books, told Gregory to let you help him with his cases, I have even convinced the nurses to stop sedating you, knowing that you found it humiliating. What do you want, Sherlock? Tell me, and I'll do my best to grant your wishes," Mycroft insisted.

He could not bear to see his little brother like that; he knew Sherlock blamed him for everything that had happened since the day he had found out about Sherlock's real inclinations, and this only increased the constant sense of guilty he felt—his sempiternal, personal torture.  
From time to time Mycroft would find himself thinking that, by telling their parents what Sherlock had done, he had burned and destroyed his brother's promising future; his vivid intelligence could have done wonders, and still could; and he repeated to himself that he had done what had to be done, that he had been indulgent with Sherlock too many times and that, by revealing the truth, Mycroft had probably avoided the death of other animals and, maybe, people; for Sherlock's beastly nature would have certainly won against his brilliant mind, sooner or later, and the path of self-damnation that his brother had decided to follow wouldn't have damaged only Sherlock, but everyone around him. Still, he had taken care of him during all the years Sherlock had been confined to the mental hospital he still was in, trying to soothe his pain. Mycroft kept visiting him almost every day after lunch, though it was completely useless.

"I've read the books you brought me at least a thousand times, and by now I know them by heart," Sherlock scoffed. "And Inspector Lestrade hasn't visited me for days."

"You can't expect him to ask your help for every case he works on, Sherlock."

"Why not? We both know I could do his job way better than him."

Mycroft stared at him intensely. After a pause, he spoke again. "Are you going through one of your boredom phases again?"

"I'm perpetually in one of my boredom phases, Mycroft—I thought you understood that much," Sherlock replied, covering his eyes with the palms of his hands. "I can feel my brain rotting. It's decaying. I'm not supposed to stay here, I'm supposed to eat the world!"

"You would have never had to stay here if you hadn't de—if it hadn't been for the… _accident_," Mycroft replied.

"It was no accident," Sherlock said in a sharp tone. "I poisoned our dog and cut it into tiny pieces. Stop justifying me."

"I should have noticed something was wrong with you since the start."

"_I_ had noticed something was wrong with me since the start."

"If I had been more observant, we could have helped you in time."

"Maybe I didn't need help," Sherlock sighed. "Maybe I wanted to keep my curse."

"And be locked here?" asked his brother with sadness in his eyes.

"You people will never understand, with you? Your morals restrain you," Sherlock laughed—a bitter laugh. "Look at me, Mycroft. My mind is a wonderful machine, and yet I'm obliged to stay here like a common lunatic, while I'm obviously not. Yes, I might be a sociopath, but don't you realise all the things I could have done? I could have been wonderful, but you, with your dull sense of duty, have decided to confine me here. You robbed me of my future. Have you ever asked yourself why I killed our dog and all those animals? Have you, Mycroft? I needed to be distracted. I _needed_ it!"

His brother kept quiet. He could see in Sherlock's eyes that he was going through one of his egotistical monologues again, and he could do nothing to avoid it.  
Confined in his little room, surrounded by people who were completely demented, Sherlock had, in his folly, preserved his lucidity and brilliancy, and built for himself a world where he was the victim that, instead, should have been the ruler. He kept victimising himself until he reached ridiculous levels.

"My brain is rotting and I should be stripping the world of his secrets. And you keep making me stay here, here where I can feel my neurons pop, one by one…" Sherlock paused. He was now breathing heavily, and he almost looked as he was having a panic attack. "I was safe. I never hurt the people around me, did I? No, no, _no_, I didn't, I only hurt animals, and that was because—that was because I knew I could make them be beautiful forever, and I had for so long wished to peel their skin off, to see how they were made, all the diagrams and all the veins and—"

"Sherlock, why have you stopped going out of your room to speak with the other patients?" Mycroft interrupted him. He knew exactly what his brother was going to say, for his delirious monologues always followed the same pattern: a slow, spiralling descent into pure delirium.

Sherlock blinked several times, confused and slowly gaining control over himself again. "They're fools," he said at last. "I have no interest in talking to them."

"I did try to send you someone to talk to; social interaction is very important, brother. Remember Victor Trevor?"

"He was an idiot."

"You almost bit one of his ears off."

"I had told you not to pay people to speak to me," Sherlock growled. "He _deserved_ it."

Sherlock hands were now trembling as he bit his nails. Mycroft realised that talking to him would have been useless; with a sigh, he stood up. It was time to go, and to tell the nurses to start putting sedatives into Sherlock's food again. "Well, then. I think I'll go now. You'll see me soon."

Sherlock widened his eyes. "Wait," he intimated. "I need you to do me a favour before you go."

He jumped off his bed and reached his desk. He opened one of the drawers, took something inside of it and handed it to Mycroft, who looked at it in a mixture of preoccupation and mild interest. It was a small, brown package, big enough to contain a book.

"What is this?" The elder asked.

"It's a book. I want to get it signed," Sherlock answered.

"Why have you written my address on it?"

"I don't want the author to know I'm a sociopath who's lived in a mental hospital for years. Apparently it tends to put off most people," the other replied with a smirk.

Mycroft looked at him, pondering. He took a deep breath.

"Fine, Sherlock. I'll go to the post office before going home," said he heading towards the door of Sherlock's room and putting the book inside one of the pockets of his coat. "Take care, brother."

Sherlock heard the sound of the door getting locked again. He lied down on his bed again, and closed his eyes.

Then he started laughing.

* * *

Mycroft Holmes, quite demoralised, stepped out of the hospital where his brother was recovered and lighted himself a cigarette.  
He had just finished talking with Sarah Sawyer, the chief nurse, expressing his concern for his brother's behaviour. She had exquisitely nice about it and had promised that she would have taken care of the issue, adding a small dosage of sedative to Sherlock's coffee every day. "To keep him calm," she had said.

He waited for a couple of minutes and kept smoking, standing on the pavement, for the car which was supposed to take him home. When it arrived, he put his cigarette out, threw it away in the nearest bin, and got in the vehicle. As soon as he got into it, raindrops started falling.

"So, how's your brother doing?" The driver asked him.

Mycroft sighed once more. "He worries me, Gregory."

"Isn't that a constant in your life?" D.I. Lestrade said with a bitter smile.

The other closed his eyes for a bit, as if in pain. "He's stopped talking to the other patients again. I reckon he's going through one of his obsessive phases again, and that's certainly no good."

"What, like that one time with the plants?" Lestrade asked, and Mycroft nodded. "But I thought those phases were extremely rare!"

A few months before Sherlock had asked Mycroft to bring him something alive to place in his room and, since he could not be trusted with animals, his brother had brought him some plants, mostly cacti. The sociopath had taken obsessively care of them for weeks, and then decided to slice them into tiny strips all of a sudden.

"Look at what he's given me," the Holmes said, reaching for the book inside his pocket. "Ta."

Lestrade looked at it for a second. "A package?"

"Apparently it's a book he wants to get signed," Mycroft explained. "I shall send it to the author, who is, apparently"—he paused and deciphered the name of the addressee which Sherlock had written on the package with his spidery and messy handwriting—"an unknown bloke named John Watson."

Lestrade frowned. "I think I've heard that name before. He's not very famous though, is he?"

"Emergent authors rarely are, at the start. I wonder why Sherlock's got so interested in this bloke. He never did this before," Mycroft murmured. He could not open the package to check its content for Sherlock would have certainly noticed it, and this irritated him.

"Maybe it's good for him. Maybe it keeps him distracted," Greg said, shrugging. "If he's really that bad I could visit him again—I don't know—tomorrow?"

"No, it's not a good idea at the moment," Mycroft replied. "He's got paranoid again."

For a while the only sounds in the car were the one of the engine and the one of the windshield moving. Mycroft knew exactly the meaning of the silence he was sharing with Greg Lestrade but, lacking of empathy, he wanted the unsaid things that were now floating in the air to remain unsaid for the longest time possible.

"Do you need a lift to the post office?" Lestrade eventually asked.

"Yes, Gregory," Mycroft sighed. "Thank you."

He then reached for his mobile phone and googled John Watson's name.

* * *

When Greg Lestrade got home, he poured himself a glass of scotch, turned on his computer and checked his emails.

His wife had left him long ago and now his life merely consisted of his job and a bunch of routine-bound actions he repeated only in the hope of actually giving his life a meaning. Not to mention the weird bond he had developed with both of the Holmes brothers: Sherlock was a genius and he often visited him in order to solve the impossible cases he had to face; and Mycroft… well, Mycroft was indeed a charming person. Greg somehow hoped that, behind his mask of harsh and inaccessible virtue, he still preserved some kind of humanity.

He had one new email. It was from Molly Hooper, a shy girl who worked in the morgue at St. Bart's and that had developed a weird infatuation for Sherlock. She had accompanied Lestrade to visit him only once, but apparently the sociopath's looks had had a devastating effect on her—or maybe she just wanted to be a good Samaritan. She was that kind of woman, always nice, always kind, rarely noticed by the people who surrounded her.

He opened the mail with a click and sighed.

_From: Molly Hooper mhooper —. _ _To: G. Lestrade glestrade —. _ _Subject: Weird bruises on corpse._ _Detective Inspector,_ _While I was examining the latest corpse you brought in the morgue (Jennifer Walters, the young lady who was found on the river bank) I found some bruises which apparently have no sense. I can't get my head around them! They're making it quite difficult to ascertain the cause of her death._  
_I was thinking, Sherlock Holmes might want to have a look at them?_ _I've heard from my friend Sarah, who works in his clinic, that he isn't doing very well, so focusing on a new case might be of some help for him. I certainly hope so._  
_Attached you can find a couple of photos of said bruises._ _Molly Hooper_

With a feeling of uneasiness, he avoided looking at the pictures and started typing his reply.

_From: G. Lestrade glestrade —. _ _To: Molly Hooper mhooper —. _ _Subject: RE: Weird bruises on corpse._ _I'm sorry, Ms Hooper, but Sherlock cannot be given any cases at the moment. His brother's told me he's being too paranoid lately, and he's worried that working on our cases might worsen his conditions. I'm sure you'll find out the cause of Ms Walters' death by yourself._ _G. Lestrade_

He sent it. He should have probably expected it, he thought with resignation.

He turned off his computer and tried to watch some telly. He did it almost every evening, as a part of his routine. When he was still with his wife, they would watch it together, hugging on the couch.  
"_Ye good ol' times_," he whispered to himself, bitterly.

After a while, he found himself looking at the TV screen without actually seeing it, isolated in his own cogitations.

He wondered why Sherlock Holmes had developed such a weird interest towards John Watson, who was, after all, an almost completely unknown author. It then occurred to him that he had seen him on the news quite a short time before. The writer had looked like an utterly normal bloke to him—he had an honest face, blondish hair and a quite ridiculous nose; his eyes were piercing, and he was short. Normal. He could not understand why someone Sherlock, who was indeed bonkers, could have possibly liked him. Then Lestrade realised that Sherlock never watched TV and didn't have a computer, so he hadn't probably even seen the writer's face.

He had written a book about a desert, hadn't he? The D.I. could almost see its cover flash before his eyes: it was red, and the title of the book was—he placed his right hand on his eyes, trying to remember—it was _A god on the sand_. Yes, it was.

_A god on the sand_, by John Watson. A book about a man wandering alone in the desert. A book that had managed to impress Sherlock Holmes. How very quaint.

He wondered if texting Mycroft about it could have been a good idea.

Anyway, he chose not to.


End file.
